Perhaps the most critical factor that determines commercial success or failure in the tree fruit industry is the need for effective, economical methods to process, store and package the fruit prior to sale. This is especially true in diverse fruit industries, such as the apple industry, where wholesale buyers discriminate between as many as twelve sizes, and four color grades, of product for one variety of apple. Such diverse markets call for extraordinarily complex machinery and processes to handle, sort and package the fruit, to satisfy stringent buyer and consumer expectations. In addition to these requirements, most fruit processing and packing operations must meet strict product integrity and wholesomeness standards, which calls for machinery and methods that minimize physical injury and other degradative impacts, such as contamination, of the fruit.
In the apple industry, the methods available for processing and packing fruit are generally limited to two types. The first method is commonly referred to as the "commit to pack" method. In this process, harvested fruit transported from the orchard in bins is emptied from the bin at the processing plant, by submerging the bin in water to gently float the fruit out of the bin. The fruit is then run through conventional washing, waxing and grading machines, and is finally packed into one bushel boxes. In this process, every acceptable piece of fruit that arrives from the orchard is packed into a box. The full boxes are then shipped, or stored as inventory. Because apple sales typically involve only a limited number of available sizes and/or grades of fruit, the packing facility often incurs significant expenses to maintain a large packed inventory. This in turn necessitates a large volume warehouse, because the fruit packed in boxes takes up more space than fruit stored in bins. In addition, because commit to pack facilities must invest capital resources in pre-packing its inventory, such facilities must often liquidate inventory at a lower price than could be obtained at a later date, when particular sizes and grades may be in higher demand. Finally, when pre-packed inventories of fruit are maintained in storage prior to sale, major expenses attributable to spoilage may also be incurred. If an inspector identifies rotting fruit in a single package, the entire lot of fruit must be repacked, greatly increasing the already significant packing costs.
The second general method for processing apples is known as the "presize" method. A presize plant is a large facility which eliminates many of the operating setbacks of commit to pack facilities, but requires a large capital investment to establish and maintain. In a presize operation, laden fruit bins from the orchard are submerged in water, sorted and then re-binned according to size and grade. In this manner, the presize facility is able to maintain an inventory of apples, separated and recorded by size and grade, without committing the up-front cost and warehose volume required in a commit to pack operation. When an order is received, bins of pre-sized and pre-graded apples can be retrieved, and the apples can be inspected and culled at the time of final packing. This maximizes profitability of the facility, by increasing market responsiveness, eliminating repacking requirements, and minimizing storage costs.
Despite the numerous advantages of presize fruit packing, this method suffers a number of significant drawbacks. In the first place, only the largest investors can afford the major capital expenditures required to set up and maintain a presize facility. Presize plants must be housed in exceptionally large buildings, to accomodate the extensive sytems of "hydro-fillers" used to re-bin the sorted apples. These hydro-fillers are the largest piece of equipment in any apple packing facility, measuring about 80 feet in length with their water canals, or flumes. In addition to this large space requirement, presize facilities impose heavy environmental burdens associated with excessive water use and wastewater disposal. When the apples are re-binned, they are suspended in water which must be chlorinated to minimize contamination and spoilage. A great deal of water must be used and disposed of every day of operation. Disposal costs can be so extreme that larger facilities maintain their own wastewater treatment plants. Thus, whereas the capital investment for a typical presize plant begins at about $2.5 to $3.5 million, the costs for maintaining and upgrading such plants can be even greater. Therefore, most independent processors cannot afford presize facilities, and must endure the economic and competitive disadvantages inherent in commit to pack enterprises.
Although the preferred method of fruit processing and packing is to pack only what inventory has been sold, and re-bin the rest for bulk storage by size and grade, them are presently no suitable alternatives to the use of hydro-fillers, as employed in the presize apple packing industry, to accomplish efficient presize processing. Specifically, the use of hydro-fillers allows for rapid, gentle handling and re-binning of the fruit, because water serves as an effective cushion medium to minimize physical damage to the fruit caused by jostling and impacting of the fruit against other fruit and hard processing equipment surfaces. Heretofore there has been no acceptable "dry" process for handling and packing fruit that compares favorably in terms of gentleness to hydro filler methods. Although dry bin fillers are known in the industry, these devices generally result in high levels of fruit rolling, bumping and impacts. Such dry bin fillers typically load fruit into bins positioned at floor level, using conveyor systems which transport fruit into the bins from heights of up to four feet. Control of fruit movement due to dropping, rolling and jostling is limited, resulting in unacceptable levels of bruising which may render the fruit unsaleable. Further, the gentleness of dry bin loading methods is generally a function of the speed at which the loading system operates, so that a dry bin loading system must sacrifice operating rate efficiency to ensure reasonable product quality.
In view of the above, them is an importand need in the tree fruit industry for a fruit processing and packing system that can gently and rapidly transfer damage-succeptible tree fruits, such as apples, into standard shipping and storage bins.
There is an additional need for a fruit processing and packing system which provides comparable gentleness and rapidity of fruit handling as conventional hydro-filler systems, but which eliminates the large capital and space requirements of hydro-filler systems, and obviates the environmental mitigation measures necessary to install and operate such systems.